Google Cloud egress pricing is per GiB by where the traffic goes: free within a zone and to Google services in the region, cents between zones, more between regions by continent pair, and the most to the internet, in tiers per month and by destination, on the Premium tier that routes over Google's backbone or the Standard tier that hands traffic to the internet near its source; inbound traffic is free. Around the bytes sit the resources that carry them: forwarding rules and proxy instances of the load balancers per hour plus data processed per GiB, Cloud NAT per gateway-hour and GiB, public IP addresses per hour in use or idle, Private Service Connect endpoints per hour and GiB, VPN tunnels and Interconnect attachments per hour. On the bill, internet egress dominates on anything that serves users, inter-region traffic on anything replicated, and the load balancer's forwarding rules and NAT gateway are the lines that cost before the first byte flows.

Pricing dimensions

Google prices the network by the boundary a byte crosses and the thing that carries it across; every boundary and resource has its own SKU, and the source region sets the rate.

DimensionUnitWhat drives itOptional
Within a zone and to Google servicesFree between instances in one zone over internal addresses and to Google APIs and services in the same regionInternal trafficNo
Between zones in a regionGiB in each direction over internal addressesMulti-zone deployments, replication, cross-zone load balancingNo
Between regionsGiB by continent pair, Europe to Europe cheapest, to other continents by the destinationMulti-region replication, remote clients, global load balancersNo
Internet egress, Premium tierGiB in three tiers per month per destination continent from the source region, routed over Google's backbone; China and Oceania dearerResponses to users, downloads, API clientsNo
Internet egress, Standard tierGiB in tiers with the first 200 GiB a month free, routed over the public internet from the source region; regional resources onlyServices that tolerate the public internet's pathYes
Public IP addressesHour per address in use on a VM, at half that on Spot, per address used by Cloud NAT, and at a higher rate per static address reserved but unusedEvery external address, assigned or notYes
Load balancersFirst five forwarding rules per hour as one block, every further rule per hour; data processed per GiB inbound and outbound; the Application Load Balancer additionally per proxy instance-hour with a minimum of proxies per regionEvery load balancer, with or without trafficYes
Cloud NATPer VM-hour using the gateway up to a cap per gateway-hour, plus per GiB processed in both directionsEvery private VM reaching the internetYes
Private Service ConnectEndpoint per hour plus per GiB in tiersPrivate access to Google APIs and producer servicesYes
Cloud VPN and Cloud InterconnectTunnel per hour; VLAN attachment per hour by capacity plus egress per GiB to the on-premises side at Interconnect ratesHybrid connectivityYes
Purchase optionNone on traffic; Network Service Tiers and the volume tiers apply by themselves

The source region and the destination decide the rate: a byte from Frankfurt to a user in Europe costs a few cents less per GiB than one to a user in North America and almost twice that to Oceania, and the tiers fall only after the first and tenth TiB in a month. The Standard tier cuts the rate by about a third but routes traffic over the public internet from the region, which is why it is for regional services that can take the longer path, not for global load balancers or Cloud CDN. Between regions the pair decides, Europe to Europe at a fraction of Europe to Asia, and between zones every GiB costs the same small amount, which adds up on databases that replicate across zones and on load balancers that spread traffic across them. The resources that carry the traffic cost before it flows: a load balancer pays its forwarding rules every hour, a NAT gateway pays per VM that uses it, and a reserved address pays more idle than in use. The mechanics across all three providers are in data transfer and egress and load balancers, NAT and public IPs; what a NAT gateway is for and costs, in the glossary.

How it appears in your billing data

In the billing export the traffic rows carry the service.description of the service that sent the bytes, Compute Engine for instances, Cloud Storage for buckets, Cloud SQL for databases, and a sku.description that names the boundary: Network Internet Egress from Frankfurt to EMEA, Network Internet Egress from Frankfurt to Americas, Network Standard Tier Internet Egress from Frankfurt, Network Inter Region Egress from Frankfurt to Netherlands, Network Inter Zone Egress, Network Google Egress from Frankfurt to Frankfurt at zero; usage.unit is gibibyte and usage.amount the bytes. The carriers appear under Networking or the service: Network Load Balancing: Forwarding Rule Minimum Service Charge in Frankfurt for the first five rules, Network Load Balancing: Forwarding Rule Additional Service Charge, Network Load Balancing: Data Processing in Frankfurt per GiB, Application Load Balancer Proxy Instance Charge per hour, Cloud NAT Gateway Uptime per VM-hour and Cloud NAT Data Processing per GiB, Static Ip Charge for unused reserved addresses and External IP Charge on a Standard VM for addresses in use, Private Service Connect Endpoint Hours and Private Service Connect Data Processing, VPN Tunnel Hours. resource.name in the export with resource-level detail names the instance, forwarding rule, gateway or address; the traffic of a bucket or database carries that service's resource.

Credits are rare on these rows: the Standard tier's free 200 GiB and the first GiB of a few services appear as credits.type FREE_TIER; there is no committed use discount on traffic. The export's structure is described in the Google Cloud billing export; in the FOCUS export, ServiceCategory carries Networking for the carriers and the sending service for the bytes, SkuId the SKU and ChargeCategory Usage (FOCUS columns). Which instance or bucket sent the internet egress is in the VPC Flow Logs and the service's metrics, not in the export's sums per SKU; the attribution per team rests on the sending resource's labels.

Bytes crossing a boundaryA row under the sending service:Compute Engine, Cloud Storage orCloud SQL, the SKU naming theboundary, destination and tierA load balancer, a NAT gateway,a reserved addressRows under Networking: forwardingrules, gateway hours and bytes,address hoursCredits rare: the Standard tier'sfree allowance; no committeduse discount on traffic
Traffic rows sit under the service that sent the bytes with the boundary in the SKU, the carriers under Networking, and nothing is committed

Levers

Configuration: the first lever is the tier per service, Standard for regional services that serve users near the region and do not sit behind a global load balancer; the second is the number of forwarding rules and gateways, because every load balancer pays its first five rules as a block and a NAT gateway per VM, so one gateway per region and one load balancer per environment beat one per service; the third is the addresses, because a reserved address pays more unused than used and a VM in a private subnet behind NAT needs none. The patterns are in data transfer optimisation.

users near the region, noglobal load balancerusers far away, or behinda global load balancerWho does theservice serve?Standard tier egressPremium tierOne NAT gateway per region andone load balancer per environment:the first five rules a block,a gateway per VM otherwiseAddresses: a reserved addresspays more unused than used
Standard tier where the users are near the region, one gateway per region and one load balancer per environment, and no address reserved without a use

Purchase option: none; the volume tiers of internet egress apply by themselves.

Architecture: keep traffic inside the zone where the application allows it, because inter-zone bytes pay and intra-zone do not; Private Google Access and Private Service Connect for Google APIs instead of NAT, because the NAT gateway charges per GiB for traffic Google would carry free; a CDN in front of static content, because cache egress is cheaper than the origin's (Cloud CDN and Cloud Armor); and a region with the users, because the Premium tier's rate rises with the distance. What a load balancer in Kubernetes costs is in services, load balancers and egress.

Where it goes wrong

  • The NAT gateway carries the backups. A nightly backup to Cloud Storage runs through Cloud NAT and pays per GiB for traffic Private Google Access would carry free. Cloud NAT Data Processing beside Network Google Egress at zero is the clue.
  • A load balancer per service. Twenty services with a load balancer each pay twenty blocks of five forwarding rules per hour. An ingress or gateway with host and path rules bundles them.
  • The reserved address nobody uses. A static address reserved for a deleted VM pays more per hour unused than in use. Static Ip Charge names the count; release them.
  • The database replicates across zones. A regional database and its replicas pay inter-zone egress for every replicated byte. The replication volume is the measure, not the instance size.
  • The bucket is in the wrong region. Compute in Frankfurt reading a bucket in Belgium pays inter-region egress on every read. Co-locate.
  • Premium tier for a regional service. A regional API that serves European users on the Premium tier pays a third more per GiB than it would on Standard. Standard where the global anycast address is not needed.
  • The egress grew with the users. Internet egress scales with responses, not with servers; a popular download page pays more in egress than in compute. A CDN and compression are the levers.

Example

List prices in USD for traffic from Frankfurt (europe-west3), read on 2026-10-21 from the network pricing pages: Premium tier internet egress to Europe costs USD 0.12 per GiB for the first TiB a month, USD 0.11 to 10 TiB and USD 0.08 beyond; to North America the same tiers at USD 0.085 beyond 10 TiB; to Asia USD 0.15, 0.13 and 0.11; to Oceania USD 0.19, 0.18 and 0.15; to China USD 0.23, 0.22 and 0.20; Standard tier egress is free for the first 200 GiB a month, then USD 0.085 per GiB to 10 TiB, USD 0.065 to 150 TiB and USD 0.045 beyond; between zones in a region USD 0.01 per GiB; between regions in Europe USD 0.02 per GiB, from Europe to North America USD 0.05, to Asia USD 0.08. A public address in use on a VM costs USD 0.005 per hour, on a Spot VM USD 0.0025, reserved but unused USD 0.012; a regional load balancer's first five forwarding rules USD 0.025 per hour and every further rule USD 0.01, data processed USD 0.01 per GiB; an Application Load Balancer proxy instance USD 0.025 per hour and USD 0.008 per GiB; Cloud NAT USD 0.0014 per VM-hour up to USD 0.045 per gateway-hour, plus USD 0.045 per GiB processed; a Private Service Connect endpoint USD 0.01 per hour and USD 0.01 per GiB.

A service that sends 5 TiB a month to users in Europe pays 1,024 × 0.12 plus 4,096 × 0.11 = USD 573.44 on the Premium tier and 4,920 × 0.085 = USD 418.20 on Standard; the same bytes to Oceania USD 931.84. A database that replicates 10 TiB a month across two zones pays USD 102.40 of inter-zone egress; across two European regions USD 204.80. A load balancer with one forwarding rule costs USD 18.25 a month of rules; twenty of them USD 365.00. A NAT gateway used by 20 VMs that push 2 TiB a month to the internet costs 20 × 730 × 0.0014 = USD 20.44 of gateway time plus 2,048 × 0.045 = USD 92.16 of processing, on top of the egress itself; the same 2 TiB to Cloud Storage through Private Google Access costs nothing on the network. Fifty reserved addresses that sit unused cost 50 × 730 × 0.012 = USD 438.00 a month. The figures show that the destination multiplies the egress price, that NAT doubles the cost of bytes that Private Google Access would carry free, and that rules, gateways and idle addresses are the lines that cost without traffic.

Sources

Read on 2026-10-21. Prices: Google Cloud network pricing, Cloud NAT pricing, Cloud Load Balancing pricing. Service: Network Service Tiers, Private Google Access. Billing data: structure of the standard Cloud Billing data export.